The Green Party of Manitoba says it wants to "work smarter for rural Manitoba."

Manitoba's Green ag critic Kate Storey says her party will reinvest in rural communities and help smaller farms gain market access where they've been shut out. She also says the Green Party wants to eliminate the education tax from both farmland and buildings.

"We don't think that paying for schools through property tax works because it's inequitable," Storey says. "You have rich (school) divisions, and you have poor divisions. All kids deserve an equal education, and so of course the province has developed this complicated system to equalize it all. Well let's just cut that all out and get rid of the school taxes, and just pay for education out of the general revenues."

As part of the party's pledge to help small farmers, they're also looking to make changes for hog producers. Storey, a former hog farmer herself, says they want to restore the single desk for hog marketing, as they feel it would help smaller-scale producers achieve better market access.

"As soon as that single desk was destroyed, all of a sudden the big companies don't want to deal with me and my 100 hogs, or my neighbour and his 500 hogs, they want to deal with somebody who can sell them 20,000 hogs a year," she says, adding that this also has environmental impacts.

"What that does, then, is it concentrates the barns into fewer spots and it concentrates the manure, and then Lake Winnipeg gets full of hog manure — and other manure as well, sewage and stuff — but the hog farmers get blamed."

Storey says they would encourage more producers to raise hogs throughout the province instead of concentrated in specific areas. To go along with this, the Green Party of Manitoba says it would replace the hog barn moratorium with a requirement that all barns must use adequate manure spread acres, measured by soil phosphate content. This would double the current requirement for spread acres.

Other priorities for the Green Party include focusing on food quality, working to reduce flooding, and increasing extension services to farmers.